Megaprojects must be delivered on time and to budget, but critically they also need to be secure and reliable. Our future depends on it, and the clock is ticking for us to get this right.
Part of the reason Britain is missing out is that the Government treats online betting and gaming as a cash cow to be milked rather than an industry to be nurtured. Making it dearer and harder to bet legally does not magically eliminate demand. It simply redirects it to the black market and across the Atlantic.
The Lib Dem conference may have been a third-order news story, but its message should still matter to the Conservatives. We continue to be squeezed from both sides of the electoral spectrum, and we don’t have the luxury of picking which opponent to fight.
The recent exchange of letters does not instil confidence in their policies and show no understanding of the role domestic policies have played in driving prices higher. Once again they leave us well above the target they are meant to hit. Policy meanwhile drifts and the Chancellor fails to take action to rein in the cost of living pressures on a large enough scale to have a useful impact.
There will be a reckoning, whether by virtue of an economic catastrophe, war or a bond market crisis. Such a calamity could be avoided if the Prime Minister, guided by the long-term best interests of our nation, rather than the short-term demands of his political base, took decisive action to cut spending and incentivise growth. I for one am not holding my breath.
Of course, we can’t miraculously solve all problems immediately. But at least we can stop apologising, and start by identifying the person who really should apologise.
I’m making a big assumption that Reform is interested in mutual benefit. It’s equally possible that they haven’t given up their ambition to kill us off — or that their primary objective at the next election is to replace us as the official opposition. In which case, they need to know that if they want all-out-war we will give it to them.
The Cardiff memorandum asserted nothing new, established no common route to separation, and bound none of the three devolved governments. Trump’s intervention revealed more about his ignorance than Northern Ireland’s future.
The game isn’t really a test of whether millions of adults can tell fiction from reality. They can and always could. It’s a test of whether we still trust them to run their own lives without supervision. Thatcher herself called liberty a moral quality, one that carries accountability for how each person uses it.
What is troubling for democracy is the apparent lack of interest from all parties in the integrity of the ballot. As anyone ever involved in election campaigns can testify, postal voting is open to abuse, including in connection with ‘family voting’, a previously hidden issue which came onto the radar in Gorton and Denton.
The Welsh government must mandate that failing schools be taken over by academy trusts; re-introduce school league tables; reform the national curriculum into a knowledge-based one; abolish the use of the cueing method; and implement Etsyn’s recommendations immediately.
We know the end of this miserable, sad story. There will be no return to pre-1967 borders. In the coming decades, Palestinian pockets of control will become smaller and smaller. The willingness of the Israeli victors to deal with the Palestinian leadership will wither. Palestinians will become a new diaspora.
For Burnham and for Labour, local government isn’t about giving people choice over how their local area is run, and it isn’t about providing local services either. It’s just another forum for the high-tax, low-accountability politics which informs everything that this Labour Government has done since coming to power.
Through training, new investments and technologies we can demonstrate why counties across the UK can and will benefit from being part of our national mission to rebuild our defences, strengthen our resilience and create a renewed sense of unity. We can stop talking about what “Britishness” is and get on with living it.